Furthermore, it is certain that about this time, steel pens began rapidly to supersede the use of quills,* and the trade was recognized as a rising industry. It is true that it still retained the secretive character with which its operations were conducted in its earlier days, which indeed in some respects distinguish it at the present time. Its activity or dullness seldom troubles the writers of the “Trade Reports” in the local press, although they sometimes inform their readers about good orders having been placed for mousetraps, stove screws, snuffer trays, candle extinguishers, and sad irons.

*In a humorous article, “The Web-footed Interests,” which appeared in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, vol. iii., page 280 (1833), there is a petition to the House of Commons, from Ganders, Geese & Goslings, setting forth the evils likely to ensue from the use of metallic pens. It prognosticates depression in agriculture and manufactures consequent upon a diminution in the amount of grain consumed, and a falling off in the demand for penknives; and draws an alarming picture of the possible failure of the supply of iron ware, and the total extinction of literature, likely to ensue through a stoppage in the supply of steel pens,—the web-footed interest being supposed to have ceased to exist. The petition concludes with a prayer that the manufacture of metallic pens be prohibited.

To the writers of the present generation, who can purchase fairly-good pens at one shilling or one shilling and sixpence per gross, it seems hard to realize that people once gave one shilling each for substitutes for quills. It is true that quills could then be bought for a halfpenny and penny each, but how difficult it was to acquire the art of successfully manipulating the same into a pen the following anecdote from “Edwards' Life of Rowland Hill” will testify:

“Mrs. Sinkinson, of Jamaica Row, Birmingham, tells me she went to a school in Hurst Street, and that she remembered that old Mr. Hill came one day a week to teach arithmetic, and Rowland [Sir Rowland Hill] on another to teach writing. In those days there were no steel pens, and Rowland couldn't mend a pen, so that whenever he came he was accompanied by his brother, Matthew Davenport, whose office it was to mend the pens used by the pupils the preceding week.”

Sir Josiah Mason used to relate a similar circumstance in his own life, when at Kidderminster, that he accompanied his brother Richard, who was a Sunday-school teacher, to mend the pens.

Comparing the crude specimens of early steel pens with the finished productions of the present day, we may be inclined to think that some praise was due to the people who persevered in the use of them; but that the purchasers of these early productions did appreciate them we have the testimony of Mr. Robert Griffin, who says that he wrote for eight weeks, eight hours a day, with a pen made by Perry, in 1824. Now, the old ”scribes,” as the law stationers' writers were called, were generally allowed one quill a day, and as the work of the day usually wore out the longest quill, a considerable amount of time must have been occupied in the renovation of the article.* This would be a serious inconvenience to those who could manufacture a quill into a pen, but as this was by no means an universal accomplishment, we can form an idea how even these clumsy substitutes found purchasers at such high prices.

*The writer recollects the tedious waiting for the patient usher, who from desk to desk with his penknife, mending pens, and paying very little attention to anything else; also the wonder felt and expressed at the first sight of steel nibs, and how they dug into the paper.

Tom Hood, in his “Whims and Oddities,” gives some idea of the pre- steel-pen era:

In times begone, when each man cut his quill,
With little Perryian skill;
What horrid, awkward, bungling tools of trade
Appeared the writing instruments, home made!
What pens were sliced, hewed, hacked, and haggled out,
Slit or unslit, with many a various snout,
Aquiline, Roman, crooked, square, and snubby,
Humpy and stubby;
Some capable of ladye-billets neat,
Some only fit for ledger-keeping clerk,
And some to grub down, Peter Stubbs, his mark,
Or smudge through some illegible receipt,
Others in florid caligraphic plans,
Equal to ships, and wiggy heads, and swans!
To try in any common inkstands then,
With all their miscellaneous stocks,
To find a decent pen,
Was like a dip into a lucky-box;
You drew, and got one very curly,
And split like endive in some hurly-burly;
The next unslit, a square at end, a spade;
The third, incipient pop-gun, not yet made;
The fourth a broom; the fifth of no avail,
Turned upwards, like a rabbit's tail;
And last, not least, by way of a relief,
A stump that Master Richard, James, or John
Had tried his candle cookery upon,
Making 'roast beef!'”

These early pens were at first made from a piece of steel formed into a tube, and filed into the shape of a pen by hand, the joint of the two edges forming the slit. Afterward a blank was roughly punched out, filed into shape, and the slit marked out with a chisel while the blank was in a soft state. It was then shaped, hardened, tempered, ground, and the slit cracked through by means of a hammer and tool at the place where the mark had been made. The engravings of the pens by Edwards, which appeared in Wrightson's Directory, 1823, seem to indicate that the piercing, side cutting and slitting were executed by mechanical appliances. Possibly, Edwards was not a manufacturer himself, but had his pens made for him by Mitchell.